The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission published the third release of the inventory of Smart Grid Laboratories worldwide. The report containing aggregated technical information about the smart grid activities carried out by smart grid laboratories in Europe and has been published in the beginning of 2019.

R&D NESTER has been identified again as a European laboratory relevant in the field of Smart Grids. 

Includes technical data about 89 smart grid laboratories. The majority of the participant laboratories are located in Europe (69), covering a large number of countries. The major part of labs is in Italy and Spain (11 and 14, respectively) with Portugal following (7 Laboratories).

Some general conclusions achieved were:

• Generation and Distributed Energy Resources (DER) (85.2%), Demand Response (75%), Grid Management (75%) and Storage (70.5%) are the main focus of the lab activities.
• There is an increased interest in Generation and DER, ICT and Electromobility.
• The sector to which most of the work is addressed, is utility (70.5% of labs conduct research for it), with industry and academia following with 66% and 65% respectively.
• Technology development, R&D of equipment, standards development and prototype testing are fields on which more than 70% of the labs work on.
• 90% of the labs have their research activities on the distribution grid, whereas the islanded grid and the transmission grid are the ones to follow with 60% and 57% respectively.
• Almost 1/3 of the labs have spent between EUR 100,000 and EUR 500,000 as initial lab investments. Almost 1 out of 10 labs (11%) has dedicated investments of up to EUR 4 - EUR 5 million for the lab setup. The period in which these investments are spanned varies; however, almost 4 out 10 labs (38.5%) have performed the investments throughout 2-3 years.

The report ‘Smart Grid Laboratories Inventory 2018' is available to download https://ses.jrc.ec.europa.eu/smart-grid-laboratories-inventory.

For additional information, please visit Joint Research Centre publications webpage.